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The mission today is the corner store, made more difficult by the fact that they don’t have to sneak in, get what they need, and get out, and instead they’re allowed to linger. Without the urgency of a simple grab-and-go operation, their quick grocery run stretches most of the afternoon, and Leo’s feeling increasingly like he’s trying to herd three whole new versions of Mikey’s cat, Klunk. At least he was, then he got stuck on reading the labels of different brightly colored cereal boxes, trying to decypher alphabets entirely alien to him to pick the best cereal out of them, since they no longer carry their favourite brand a hundred years into the future. He eventually decides on one with a similar flavour, theoretically, when his brothers emerge from the aisles carrying… a lot more than what their short grocery list said. There are snacks piled high in their hands, perishables, vegetables, fruits, at least seven different types of cheese and some weird fizzy drinks imported from Japan. And Leo’s carrying Cody’s spare bank card with a sum of money that made his head spin when Serling told him.
They emerge from the corner store with a large grocery bag each – Raph’s even carrying two – and in high spirits.
“Man, the future is awesome!” Mikey yells, seemingly not caring for the crowd on the streets, fishing out grapes from the paper bag in his hands.
“Gotta admit it, this part’s not so bad,” Raph agrees. “Pass one of those, Mikey!”
Mikey throws a piece of grape in his direction, and Raph, with his two hands occupied, opens his mouth to catch it. His production’s met with a round of applause and soon Leo finds himself in the middle of a competition of increasingly elaborate ways to eat a piece of grape, during which he once manages to slice one clean in half, mid-air.
“Show-off,” Raph rolls his eyes, but his heart isn’t really in it.
“No fair!” Mikey pouts. “You didn’t even eat it.”
“Nobody said only eating them earns points,” Don shrugs. “I’m next.”
He is lighting-quick as he draws his collapsible bō and swings it, Leo doesn’t even see him hit the grape. He does see the grape hit Mikey, square between his eyes, and the look on his face is precious. Donnie snickers and at the same time, Raph hollers like this is the best thing he’s seen all week. And maybe it is – at the very least, Leo considers it a strong contender.
“Okay, that’s really not fair,” Mikey says and he stops, firmly rooting himself on the road in front of them. He reaches for his belt, for one of his nunchucks. “Do one more, I wasn’t ready.”
Don snickers again but nods, readying his weapon. When Mikey throws the next grape, he hits it in a graceful arc, returning it to the sender. Only Mikey doesn’t deflect it, he doesn’t even try, he just opens his mouth. And before Leo can blink, the grape’s gone, only their brother stands there with a proud, solemn expression plastered on his face, like the statues lining the Hall of Champions in the Battle Nexus.
And then he breaks out in a laugh.
And Donnie starts then, also, and Raph, and laughter bubbles up in his throat too and Leo clutches the bag of groceries closer to his chest in fear of dropping them. Mikey’s laughter is infectious, spreading, contaminating all four of them like it always does. It dizzies Leo, and he feels lightheaded from this strange kind of vertigo that’s so much like what you get swimming through the air mid-leap between two rooftops in a crazy late-night race with his brothers' voices hollering behind and ahead, joking, teasing, urging each other to go faster and faster. They haven’t done that in a while, no training runs or patrols among the skyscrapers of the familiar yet alien city, no need to restrain themselves to the hours of night in the bright world of the future.
It catches him then, sneaking up on him like something out of the shadows of those nights, how easy everything is right now, light-flowing, how often and how openly he is able to laugh exactly like this, to share a smile with someone, to bump into his brothers, to hold his father’s hand. It feels ill-fitting, suddenly, for him. Like his swords re-forged. The same, yet their weight slightly off from what he’d been used to and he was fumbling, struggling for balance, stability in his stance, certainty in his strike. It’s easy now. But has it always been? No, not for him.
The thought surprises him, but once it’s rooted itself into the soil of his consciousness, it stays. Stubbornly. Viciously, like the steel teeth of a pair of shukos etching themselves into a wall, nothing budges it. Insantly, Leo becomes keenly aware that at some point, though he didn’t mean to, he stopped laughing with his brothers. They didn’t notice, or are pretending not to have noticed, old reflexes kicking in, and instead the conversation has shifted to evening plans – Raph and Mikey are arguing over picking a movie, apparently. Leo’s grateful, a little bit, maybe, for that, and he doesn’t exactly hide behind the grocery bag but uses it to only kinda-sorta shield his face. Just for a bit, before the argument inevitably escalates into a fight, at which point he’ll have to step in anyway. Or he will step in, as he always does, out of habit though perhaps not out of necessity. He can’t remember if he ever asked how such fights went down while he was away, if it was their sensei who reminded everyone of their duty as brothers or if it was Don who played peacekeeper or if Raph and Mikey even fought at all. He never asked what anything was like while he was away, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to imagine it. He imagined it enough on the long journey to the other side of the world, in lonely hours at the Ancient One’s home in the beginning, and then less and less, gradually, until he made peace with not knowing.
When he returned, they were changed. He was too. An adjustment, Don called it, but it was easier, easier than Leo had ever thought possible, to fall back into the rhythm, to take the place that had been his before he grew too sharp and jagged to fit in it, to move without cutting those around him. It was easy again. They had to settle into a new home and a new way they worked, but Leo was back, changed but the same, and gradually he found himself smiling again. Staying close to the others, joking and in turn laughing at jokes, teasing nudges and fond eye-rolls, he was doing them before even noticing, before it dawned on him how long he went without. This awareness, it came in waves, like just now, rolling over him and drowning out everything else, forcing him face to face with the Leonardo of those times, the Leonardo wrapped up in his hardened shell like in an armour, facing every day like a battle he was sure one of them would not return from.
In the end, the argument stays just that. Unless you consider Raph pulling the ends of Mikey’s mask and Mikey reiterating by sticking his tongue out at him, calling him a slowpoke and sprinting ahead as soon as they get home to get his grabby hands on the remote, a fight. But Leo’s seen his brothers fight for real many times over the years, so he doesn’t.
“Raph’s losing his edge,” Don says with a chuckle, putting his share of groceries on the counter. Mikey’s snatched the remote from the couch in an impressive dive and is happily ignoring Raph’s warning growls. But they both know Mikey is faster. Actually, scratch that, Mikey probably also knows Mikey is faster. “It’s the future. He’s pissed off just being here.”
“He’s pissed off everywhere,” Leo says. “But you’re right. You know how he is with change.”
“Yep,” Don pops the p a little at the end. “Bad.”
It off-sets him, throws him out of balance and teetering on the edge, but Raph handles change like he handles everything, head-on, unwavering, fists clenched tight and head held high in the face of whatever the universe throws at him. He’d said that Leo, in the throes of his losing battle against himself, angry and lashing out, reminded him of himself. Funny, just when Leo wished he was more like Raph, just when he wished he was even half as strong as his brother.
“I get it,” he hums. “It’s not easy, adapting to… all of this. It’s kind of hard to trust broad daylight when we grew up learning it was our enemy. Sometimes when I see someone else out on the streets, my first thought is to find an alley to disappear in.”
But they don’t need to do that anymore. They can walk to the grocery store, to a mall, to a diner. They can go see a movie or a match or an exhibition without wrapping themselves in layers and layers of loose human clothes. No longer restricted to the shadows, Leo wonders if they can even still call themselves ninja.
“I did that, the other day,” Don tells him. They go out alone, to run errands or explore the city, without each other more and more these days, and Leo tells himself it’s safe. “Pretty sure I would have given Serling a heart attack if he wasn’t a robot.”
It’s half a joke, wrapped up in something innocuous and factual, and very Donnie-like in that, and Leo chuckles a bit.
“You?” he asks, feigned surprise in his voice, this fondness for his brother getting him to play-pretend, his half of a joke. Perhaps making up a whole, together. It is still a relief to hear that him and Raph are not the only ones to struggle with this sudden adjustment, the latest test of the universe to throw at them. Don takes such things in stride, two feet on the ground and practical like he is about everything, but even he falters sometimes. “I thought you’d like the future. All this technology and discovery–”
Don lives for these stuff. Just this week, Leo sat through impromptu lectures of some new wonder of technology or another, presented by his excitedly rambling brother, more times then he can count on his hands and feet. And to think that so much of this innovation is thanks to April and Donnie’s inventions… pride doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Their groceries forgotten, Don stops to look out the floor-to-ceiling window, to the bustling, loud and colorful city below their feet and stretching as far as they can see.
“Well,” he shrugs lightly, “it’s definitely one of the nicer ones I’ve been to.”
His words ring hollow in their faked casualness. It’s a kind of pretense none of them were ever good at, save for Mikey, who’s as open and transparent as he is hard to see through. It’s a special talent of his. But this is Don, who never honed such skills, and the moment of love and pride is snatched away from Leo, pulled under by a tide of worry. And as much as he didn’t ask about things that happened while he was away, Don didn’t talk about things that happened in the future he visited, not after those first few weeks when they managed to pry it out of him, little by little, sleepless night by sleepless night, after which came the Shredder and his ship and after which Leo didn’t think to ask at all. It feels unfair, looking back, how he just assumed his brother had moved on, when he was the one stuck in one place.
Shame returns, from earlier, growing around him, knowing how unreachable he was to his family, how far from them even before he up and went halfway across the world. But he needed help. He went because he needed help. When he returned, he saved his family, then they saved the city, then saved the world. Doomed the world, and then saved it, really, doomed it to save Don, though they didn’t know it at that time. Now that Leo knows, he would doom it again and again and a thousand times and then fight to save it a thousand times too, for he loves his brother and he loves the world too. And he knows Mikey and Raph would be right by his side, because they’re the same.
But now, the world is un-doomed. The world is safe and the future is bright. Leo doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask, doesn’t pry, he just joins Don by the window and nods slightly, encouragingly, prompting him to talk. The Ancient One says it’s never too late to mend something and Leo thinks of his swords, re-forged, thinks of thin golden lines joining broken porcelain shards.
“It changed,” Don whispers, only partly to Leo. “We did something, I don’t know what, but that future changed. It could be changed.”
Change can be good too, Leo thinks. Change means they’re not set on a path, inevitable, powerlessly pulled along by a current of non-decisions.
“Shell, Cody is living proof of that. That April and Casey…” His brother trails off. From what Leo knows, Casey was long gone in the future when Don visited. Here, his great-grandson runs around in a robot exo-suit, getting into crazy fights and giving them all a run for their money trying to keep him out of trouble. “And he knows about our future. He won’t tell anything, yes, but he knows. You know what that means, Leo?”
It’s like he’s almost afraid to speak it, afraid the hope he’s found might disappear. Time and fate are fickle things.
“It means we have a future.”
“And this is the world we leave behind when we’re gone,” Leo nods, looking out. Donnie’s right. Their future is the past of this bright world, and they can’t be sure what it holds, but if this is where it leads, Leo, for his part, is fine by finding it out the long way. “Not bad.”
Don huffs, and almost smiles.
“No,” he says. “Not bad at all.”
But he’s hiding something, still. Leo’s as good at seeing the hidden as he is at hiding himself, silent and unseen as a shadow, as he is at hiding what he doesn’t want to be seen, swallowed down and invisible. As ninja, the darkness is what keeps them safe. It’s hard to trust broad daylight, but sometimes that is still what they need to do.
“Not bad, but…?” he asks, because there is a but, because this has been hiding among the shadows for long enough.
Donnie laughs, voiceless and defeated in this game of hide-and-seek.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy it’s not our future,” he shakes his head, “But that universe still exists. They’re not my brothers, but they’re still you. And they still die. And I feel like if I don’t… I don’t know–”
And then, Leo sees it, out in the light.
“That if you don’t grieve them, nobody will?”
“Something like that.”
Leo doesn’t know them, never met that other version of himself and his brothers. He only caught a glimpse of that world when he tried to bring Donnie home from it, to no avail, only saw him, the one sharp, clear point against a hazy backdrop. He was running, through a forest or a park, with a dark figure, a figure who could have been Mikey, who looked like Mikey, wearing faded orange, their brother and yet at the same time so different, so wholly unrecognizable it pains Leo to think of him. To think of Master Splinter and his grave, of the divide that world without Donnie wedged between Raphael and himself. The other himself, who hadn’t talked to his brothers in decades, whose blades did the talking instead of him, who made darkness his home, unseen and unseeing. No longer with his family, Leo wonders if that other him could still call himself anyone’s brother.
“That other Leo…” he asks. “ Was he like… like I was? After the Shredder’s ship?”
Don looks at him, really looks, and contemplates, in that way of his that makes Leo feel like he’s under a microscope, a piece of machinery carefully dismantled in the hands of an engineer catiously weighing if cutting a wire is a good idea.
“Like that, yes,” Don says eventually. “But more… tired.”
Thirty years, Leo thinks.
“I can’t imagine. We…” he hesitates. It’s still hard to speak it. “We could have died there, Don, and it almost killed me. But at least we would have been gone together... I can’t imagine what it must have been like for them. Or you.”
It took a while, little by little, to learn from Don that their future selves didn’t simply die – that he watched them die. Mikey, then Leo himself, then finally Raph, in a final, desperate ambush on the Shredder. And Karai. And the Legions. That it was Don’s plan, that they followed his lead.
“I should have tried to talk about this with you back then, huh?” Don says now. They all followed Leo’s lead, one final, desperate plan to rid the world of the Shredder once and for all.
“Don, I wouldn’t have listened,” Leo tells him and he knows it’s true. His armour too thick, he was unreachable.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
He would, now. This part hasn’t gotten easier but if time and hard-fought fate has brought them so far, into the blinding light – where it both feels like all that swallowed up anger and fear really happened in another life, to another Leonardo, and like all those months were stolen, robbed from him personally, a precious part of his life he can never get back – then the least he can do is open his eyes. If he grabbed his brother by the hand and dragged this silent grief of his out to the light too, then at least they’ll be squinting in the sun together, unused to the brightness. It’s something of an occupational hazard.
“I haven’t met them, but they’re us. I know Raph and Mike,” he says. He would know them in any world, any timeline. “And I think I know that other Leo maybe more than anyone else in the multiverse.”
If they have any say about the path they’re walking on, Leo won’t ever become him. But he was him, for a while. He knows how alone he was and he knows why, in the end, he was willing to try and be someone’s brother again.
He knows that for a brief time, he was the brother of his brother, that he died fighting for Donnie, fighting side by side with him, with Mikey and Raph.
“You don’t have to carry their memory alone, Don.”
His brother’s scrutinizing gaze is gone, he no longer studies Leo. He just looks, and nods, a half-movement to acknowledge his words and to express a myriad other things, and that’s all Leo needs to know they’ll be okay. That, and their brothers’ usual yelling, the increasingly ridiculous threats of grievous bodily harm in rising volumes until their sensei emerges from a dark corner, one blink of an eye, and swipes the remote to switch on his own shows, which Leo actually sort of likes. The future, at least the near future, at least this evening, is looking pretty bright.